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NPR recently ran an article about the predictions for what life in 2010 was supposed to be like. The article states:

“One key to divining trends or developments is to pay attention to "material that credibly contradicts what we think we know," says  Erica Orange, a blogger for the World Future Societyand vice president of the futurist consulting group Weiner, Edrich, Brown.

A major difficulty in contemplating the future "is not so much what people don't know as it is what they think they do know," Orange says. "In order to learn new things and become truly objective about the future, you first have to begin forgetting …."

In reading that, I thought about SharePoint – not because I relate everything I read to my job, but because I really thing Erica is on to something. Think about how much easier it would be to implement SharePoint if we could get our users to forget a few things.

Folders – The perfect metaphor for storage for my generation is slowly losing its relevance, but we are stuck with folders for the foreseeable future. In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft made folders a little more powerful and a little easier to manage, but we still have the task of explaining when and why folders are not a good answer. Yes, I did mean to imply that sometimes folders are a good answer, but just as you don’t have everything in your home and office in a file cabinet, everything in SharePoint shouldn’t be in a folder.

Proxies – I mean shortcuts, I mean My Links, I mean… OK, I’m not sure what the right word is, but I mean all the things we would rather know than the actual technical name/place for something. We just upgraded our internal server to SharePoint 2010. The URL now begins http://sp2010 vs. http://sp1. Of course, we redirected the DNS entry ‘Portal’ to the new site, but people have to repair their own links and shortcuts. We (geeks) should have either made it easier to understand actual URLs or we should have figured out how to be the ‘cool people’ other people wanted to be like. Or, navigation in SharePoint should be so intuitive that none of this would ever matter. Maybe that’s our job, to make navigation easy, but I think that’s the subject of another blog post.

Cloud – Now I am introducing a new metaphor. I am using ‘cloud’ to represent every new and better thing that is on the horizon, landing outside our office or being given to us by aliens from an advanced civilization. Every time one of my users starts a question with “should we be thinking about…?” I cringe. I keep falling back on the same explanations: concerns about security, reliability, cost and little things like ownership, responsibility, backup and discovery. Again, we cannot afford to be sucked in by the hype; not by the cloud, not by the next ‘cloud’ and not by SharePoint.

Part of our job is to predict the future, but a larger part of our job is to make the future happen.We too need to start forgetting things. We need to forget our plan from three years ago. SharePoint has changed; our plan needs to change with it. Our users have changed; we need to accommodate the new way they work and we need to educate them about the reasons some of the ‘old school’ solutions still matter